www.thebodyworker.com

I don’t know if it is just me or if it’s my writing or my sites, but I can’t tell you the number of struggling massage therapists who contact me telling me how much they are struggling to build a massage practice. I know I struggled for most of my career until I started writing and creating websites and making money from doing that.

With so much information out there like all of the books and programs and articles and resources - how couls anyone really be struggling? What is it that makes the difference between someone who struggles along day to day as a massage therapist and one who is highly successful? And then I hear so many massage therapist saying this unbelieveable statement

It isn’t about the money

So why are you then driving yourself around and around in circles, beating yourself up because you don’t have enough clients to make ends meet? If money isn’t important why are you working two jobs in addition to trying to build a practice and working for free or working low paying jobs in massage therapy just to pay the rent? If money wasn’t so important why are you charging for your massages at all?

And then there are those massage therapists complaining about things like “our school didn’t have an externship - that would have guaranteed me a job in massage’ or ‘the insurance industry isn’t paying me what I was told they would’ or my employer just takes advantage of me and only pays me $15 an hour when I deserve so much more. Then there are the “I told them everything I knew about massage and they still wouldn’t get a massage or I gave them all the exercises to do and they didn’t want to do them.”

The reason why so many massage therapist fail to build a successful business has more to do with their beliefs and the ego. Your ego is the unconscious part of you - it is all of your beliefs that are really running the show and creating the struggle for you. Your ego is telling you that you aren’t worthy of charging what you are worth. It is the one who keeps complaining of all of the things outside of yourself- it’s the school’s fault, it’s the economy’s fault - it isn’t your fault! Actually it isn’t really your fault. It is a result of your early childhood upbringing where your beliefs about yourself were created. While it isn’t about blaming parents and caregivers - it is about becoming more conscious of these beliefs that were created at such an early age. The way to get in touch with your beliefs is about getting in touch with what you are feeling. What are you actually feeling the second before you complain about something else as the cause of your struggling? That is where the heart of getting out of the struggling lies! In feeling the pain, grief, saddness. Those are the feelings of the ego. Whenever you are feeling anything but love, joy and happiness you can know it is the work of the ego.

So how does one release the hold the ego has on you ? Just acknowledging the fact that you know it is your ego is the first part. But sometimes it takes time to realize that. It may be a few days later and you can say “oh there is was the other day when I was complaining that I didn’t have any clients”. The more you can become aware of the fact and practice becoming aware then one day you will be about to complain or try to give someone advice and you’ll notice that it is the ego trying to cover up a feeling and you may even be able to just feel the feeling first without having to act on it.

If we are complaining that our businesses are slow because of the economy or because we think that people just don’t want to take responsibility for themselves we can know it is the ego sending us a message. We can begin to challenge our beliefs about ourselves and learn that what we see in others or complain about is really a reflection of a part of ourselves. Somewhere inside what you see in others is really what is going on inside of you. Is it true? is what Byron Katie asks in her book “Loving What is: Four Questions that can change your life”. Is it true that it is the economy to blame for your slow business? 100% true beyond a doubt, beyond anything else and is your business slow totally 100% because of the economy? (or could it be because you didn’t market your business or do the things you need to do?)

For more resources:

Why we fail?

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Have ever wished you had invested in Microsoft 1979? or wished that you bought $500 worth of Wal-Mart Shares in 1970?

How about a recent example?

If you bought Google stock at $85/share during it’s IPO in 2004 you would have made an 800% profit in just three years!

Google is just getting started. They pay their publishers billions of dollars each month.

I just read those interesting questions and facts on joelcomm.com. He is one of the big Adsense gurus and I read his Adsense secrets last fall and immediately doubled my click through rate on my Google Adsense Ads on my sites. His latest version just came out and I could resist buying it especially since it was only $9.95. I highly recommend it if you are serious about developing a business online to make you residual income. At that price it is well worth it.

Of course he got me by then taking me to a page offering his full program for only a mere $500. Well I am sure it is good information and there is a lot of it - Cd’s and Manuals and such. I took a look at some of the content and it really didn’t look much better than what SiteBuild it! already offers through their webhosting program which includes the website and all of the tools that is needed to get your site found.

If you don’t know about Google adsense and Site Build it! yet, you might want to get serious about it so you are not kicking yourself for not getting into it now like I am about those shares in Microsoft that I never bought!

Google Adsense is what pays me more than half of my income and it is the majority of my income from my websites. The way it all works is I can put Googles ads on my sites. These ads come from Google’s adwords program which is how advertisers set up ads to be put on Google. Well you can put those same ads on your website - but it can’t just be any website. It has to be on a topic that is in demand - one that people want to know about or have. Finding that out is what Site Build it! is all about. Their Brainstorm it! software that comes with their package will help you research a site concept along with ways to make money.

Now most of you who are reading this are massage therapists - what would you create a site on? Anything that interests you and that you know a lot about. There are many massage related topics that I have talked about before on here . I also have a list of ebook ideas which can be turned into a site concept to promote which are listed on my website www.workless-playmore.com

This isn’t a get rich scheme. You will have to work about 6 hours a week for about a year and even more if you want to make more.

Google adsense is what has made the difference between me being a struggling massage therapist and being a successful one. I now get to write about massage and help educate the public about massage and help move the profession ahead.

If you don’t have time to start and make a site, you can also hire webmasters directly from SiteBuildit! to help you brainstorm and create your site. It will cost you about $1500 and about $50 a month from and that includes creating the first 10 pages. You can hire them to keep creating pages for I think it is $100 a page. When you are hiring a SBI! webmaster, you are getting someone who has taken a test and has proven themselves to be proficient using SBI! Most of them have created about 10 sites for themselves and many for others.

Or you can hire me for about half the price. I am not as skilled as those certified webmasters, but I have been around enough and done enough sites of my own and for others that I can give you a good running start. I personally have 4 SBI sites one of them being www.massagetherapycareers.com which is on the first page of Google for the keywords ‘massage therapy’ and ‘massage therapist’ - no small feat to do! When you hire me, you will also get to join my exclusive online mentoring group ( a $50 a month value) where I will help you learn SBI! yourself so you can continue creating pages. An adsense monetized site takes lots of pages (500) and lots of traffic (at least 500 people a day and preferably a few thousand like I get on my site www.thebodyworker.com) The prices that I have mentioned here are for when you purchase an SBI! site through one of my affiliate links so it includes your affiliate fee (yes you can do that too and make money reselling SBI! websites.)

So if you are ready…Get your SBI! website and let me know what I can do for you!

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The Dali Lama was just in town for the weekend promoting what he calls seeds of compassion. There were about 5 days of talks to mainly kids of all ages on compassion and how to be more compassionate toward others. I didn’t get to go to any of the events but heard him speak on TV and through his webcasts which you can find at seedsofcompassion.org.

One of the most interesting things he said was that more women should be leaders because compassion comes easier for them than it does for men because men are so caught up in their aggressive tendencies and egos! He also talked about how nothing can come of war and that talking is needed to end the differences between people. He said something about that the leaders of the world should come together and spend a few weeks on vacations together with their families so that they could see that we are all humans.

Compassion is such an interesting and complex subject. A few years ago I studied and read all that I came across on compassion - books and articles online.

What does it mean to be compassionate? Compassion is the feeling of wanting to relieve the pain and suffering and others. It goes a step beyond empathy which is feeling the feelings of another and acknowledging them in another. With compassion we move to make the other feel differently. Compassion requires that we move outside of ourselves and forget about ourselves. That requires that we be strong enough inside of ourselves to do that. If we do that and sacrifice our needs being met over another when we aren’t strong enough inside, it can end up in compassion fatigue (burnout.)

The first thing in being kind to another lies in learning to be kind to ourselves. In learning to serve others, we will often be confronted by our own suffering. It provides for many opportunities for growth and understanding. Helping others will reveal where we ourselves need helping and can lead to the path of healing.

When we first start to act compassionately, it usually is to fill some of our own needs for attention, recognition and approval. We seek what we didn’t get early in life and it is usually unconsciously. We believed those stories we were told and that we told ourself about how we were not good enough or smart enough or pretty enough until we didn’t know the difference between the truth and what is real. We developed our egos to make us feel better about ourselves when our insides were suffering and wanting the world and our lives to be different. The stories we tell ourselves are revealed when we move to help others compassionately. We feel that we can never do enough or do the right thing. We are led into our own suffering to show us the place inside us that need healing. Taking the path can lead us to authentic compassion or egoless compassion where we can come to a place of just giving to receive and to the place where all giving is receiving.

In Oprah’s recent new show “The Big Give” one of the things that keeps coming up is that when the contestants go to give away all the money they often fail to find out what the family or organization is really needing and they give what they think would be fun or nice to give. They are giving what makes them feel best rather than what others really need. Like one guy gave a party to a family that cost $500 when the family could hardly pay the rent. It lasted for an afternoon, but the $500 would have paid the bills to help reduce the stress of the family. Some of the most memorable gifts were just gifts of time and small gifts of appreciation.

When we can keep our own needs to give in check and find out what people truly need by listening to them and their stories we find authentic compassion. As we learn to open ourselves to our own suffering and feel our own pain we open ourselves more to be present with others in their suffering thereby witnessing the pain which makes it go away. I know it seems contradictory. I have been trying to fix clients for the better part of 20 years of being in practice as a massage therapist.  Once I was able to go beyond my own needs for fixing which were appreciation and a need for connection, I could see that all the scientific solutions for all of the techniques I have learned and applied suddenly laced any real importance other than just being able to have something to do with the clients.  When I could see beneath the surface and acknowledge my own feelings that were underneath the need to help and fix, I could be still enough to see that clients really had their own power to heal and if given the chance to feel their own feelings and make contact with their true essence a deeper healing could occur.  The techniques became just a way to help people feel.  The techniques became the path for uncovering the seed of compassion that were the real key to health and healing.

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I am doing quite an overhaul on my websites and have been finding some great articles and putting links to them from my site.

I didn’t have a place for these but they are timely since tax day is here. Even though these are a little outdated they are still good resources.

Tax Makeover by Cherie Sohnen Moe from Massage Therapy Journal

Give Yourself a Tax Break by Clare LaPlante from Massage Therapy Journal

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One of the ways I make additional income for myself is selling an Ebook called “The Truth about Becoming a Massage therapist” on www.massagetherapycareers.com. I started that site in about 2002 and wrote an earlier version of the ebook then and started selling it within about 2 months of setting up the website. I am now working on many other ebooks and am encouraging massage therapists to start writing their own to make a little extra money on the side each month.

I am in the process of creating a whole section on www.workless-playmore.com  about how to write, create and promote ebooks. I have been reading and studying everything I can on ebooks.

If you don’t have a website, I am also looking for people to write ebooks and I can sell them through an affiliate program for them. That means I can put the ebook for sale on my website and when people buy it I will get paid a small percentage of the fee and the writer makes money too. Both win! And as a profession we really are way behind in Ebooks. Both my sites are already am on the first page of Google for ‘massage ebooks’.

I have tons of ideas for Ebooks that can be written by massage therapists. I wish I could write them all myself but there is only so much time in the day!

We need more writers in the massage profession who are massage therapists.  We already have Paul Ingram in Canada writing tutorials that he sells on his website to clients who is booked for 3 months and charges $150 to someone who just needs to get in sooner and of course massagenerd.com is the king of ebooks and he started giving some of his away for free.

Ebooks on massage are needed to start educating the public more too as well as having more information for massage therapists.

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